Janesdiggo's List: Fracturing

• likely U.S. support for a $7 billion pipeline to carry Canadian oil to refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast.
• Clinton stirred up controversy on both sides of the border last week after saying she was "inclined" to back the project, which would carry crude oil nearly 2,000 miles from tar sands in Alberta, Canada, to Port Arthur, Texas, via Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma.
• The massive pipeline network - about five times the length of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline - is projected to move up to 1.1 million barrels of Canadian oil each day to U.S. refineries.
• Canada has become an energy powerhouse in recent years by separating petroleum from sand. Refining the oil creates more greenhouse gases than traditional crude, leading critics to argue it doesn't justify the fuel produced.
• Robert Jones, a TransCanada executive overseeing the Keystone project, said it would be the best and safest pipeline ever built and create more than 100,000 jobs in the U.S. alone.

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• Water testing by a private environmental engineering firm has found widespread contamination of drinking water with toxic chemicals in an area of Dimock Twp. already affected by methane contamination from natural gas drilling.
• he has found hydrocarbon solvents - including ethylbenzene, toluene and xylene - in the well water of "almost everybody" on and around Carter Road in Dimock where methane traced to deep rock formations has also been found.
• Residents in Dimock began raising concerns about their water nearly two years ago, when they began to notice changes in odor, color, taste and texture.
• The Department of Environmental Protection determined that Cabot Oil and Gas Corp. allowed methane from a deep rock formation to seep into 14 residential drinking water supplies through faulty or overpressured casing in its Marcellus Shale gas wells.
• What I found was hydrocarbons - ethylbenzene, toluene - in almost everybody who was impacted in the area," he said. "Oddly enough, if I were to go due east or due west of the affected area, I found nothing."
• Cabot Oil and Gas Corp. said pre-drill testing performed by Mr. Farnham when he was contracted by land agents of the company in May 2008 showed the hydrocarbon solvents and glycols preexisted in some wells.
• Mr. Stark said the company does not want to release the 2008 water tests because they contain private information about landowners, but we said, "We have the information and we stand by it."

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• “We learned that no oil and gas service companies have sought — and no state and federal regulators have issued — permits for diesel fuel use in hydraulic fracturing,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman of California and two other Democratic members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, in the letter. “This appears to be a violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act.”
• “Everyone understands that E.P.A. is at least interested in regulating fracking,” said Matt Armstrong, a lawyer with the Washington firm Bracewell & Giuliani, which represents several oil and gas companies. “Whether the E.P.A. has the chutzpah to try to impose retroactive liability for use of diesel in fracking, well, everyone is in a wait-and-see mode. I suspect it will have a significant fight on its hands if it tried it do that.”

  • Whether the EPA has the chutzpah?? How arrogant are these companies? They, and their lawyers, assume the gov't has no real authority to control them!
• Two years later, when Congress amended the Safe Water Drinking Act to exclude regulation of hydraulic fracturing, it made an express exception that allowed regulation of diesel fuel used in fracking.

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• Make no mistake -- this is a game changer. With natural gas now available from shale and other tight formations, the amount of potentially recoverable natural gas in the United States has grown by leaps and bounds. All of a sudden there is enough of the stuff to run our power plants and power our automobiles for decades, perhaps a century into the future.
• Evidence is mounting that fracking does bad things to people's drinking water.
• It appears that somehow all that fracturing and pumping are causing gas and chemicals to migrate upward into well water. Increasingly, people with wells in the vicinity of fracking operations are complaining of drinking water contaminated by natural gas or worse. In at least one location, alternate water supplies have had to be found for and delivered to folks whose water has become laced with natural gas to the point of posing a safety hazard -- like the pipes going kaboom.
• • Standard argument, much like "to big to fail", yada, yada, yada; say it's impossible and it's impossible; they never consider the probable
• Industry experts claim that contamination is just not possible. The fracking occurs so far below the water table, they say, there is no way for any contamination to occur.
• Others argue that getting at that shale gas is a duty -- contaminated water be damned.
• Maybe, just maybe it would make sense to take a step back, spend some time trying to figure out what's going on with these folks' drinking water and then maybe even figure out how to frack without the contamination, should fracking prove to be the contamination source. But perhaps that's just too sensible.

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• Thus the first four speakers (or at least the middle three) were of the “it ain’t broke so why fix it,” school, and it was left to the last member of the panel, Albert Appleton, to explain the concerns that had led to the Hearing and possible change in legislation).
• there are concerns with the fluids that are used in hydrofracing, and the industry that says it can’t afford more regulation is the one that makes these huge profits
• His main concern was that the fluids used are toxic and do not biodegrade, so that even though they are stored in deep wells, they are still there as a threat. But there are also concerns that there are not enough regulators to ensure compliance with the regulations, and that water withdrawal may have severe and negative impact on communities.
• Mr Appleton returned to the point that non-Federal regulation of the industry was a subsidy to the National Gas Industry
• typical fracing fluid contains as a chemical package he began to read the table (exhibit 36) below.
• My sense was that most of the Sub-committee did not see the reason for change, with only two or three members pushing the need for a change in regulation, but I suspect that not all the members were there and that this may have more passion on the part of those seeking the change.

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• Congress commissioned the Environmental Protection Agency to study hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking", after complaints that the process pollutes water. The EPA is slated to make public initial results of the study by the end of next year.
• Congressman Ralph Hall, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, said in a statement that he would closely review the study because he felt fracking had been the subject of "misleading attacks".

  • A Texas lawyer, he's been in politics since 1950 as a Democrat; he switched parties in 2004 when he ran and won as a Republican.
    
    In 2009-2010 received substantial contributions from Oil & Gas, Chemical Mfgs ... directly and through PACs
    
    see http://www.opencongress.org/people/money/400165_Ralph_Hall
• Several U.S. cities have begun to take action on fracking. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Buffalo, New York have preemptively banned the process.

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• Curious, isn’t it, how some of the largest shale gas producers seem to be drilling more for oil these days? According to Baker Hughes Inc., a major oil services company, last week the number of natural gas rigs operating in the U.S. fell for a fifth consecutive week to a 10-month low.
• What investors in these companies have already found is the unprofitable wellhead economics of shale gas at today’s natural gas (NG-FT4.04-0.004-0.10%)prices.
• some industry commentators are suggesting that more than a few operators will face Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection over the next year, barring a huge rise in natural gas prices.
• In response to deteriorating—if not negative—profit margins, many of the biggest shale gas producers are suddenly redeploying their rigs to drill for something much more lucrative: oil
• Far from being the game-changer it’s supposed to be, North American shale gas production isn’t even sustainable at today’s natural gas prices.

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• So energy companies are clamoring to drill. And they are getting rare support from their usual sparring partners. Environmentalists say using natural gas will help slow climate change because it burns more cleanly than coal and oil.

  • Are they misrepresenting the Environmentalist position?
• thousands of internal documents obtained by The New York Times from the Environmental Protection Agency, state regulators and drillers show that the dangers to the environment and health are greater than previously understood.
• The documents reveal that the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle.
• The Times also found never-reported studies by the E.P.A. and a confidential study by the drilling industry that all concluded that radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and other waterways.
• The risks are particularly severe in Pennsylvania, which has seen a sharp increase in drilling, with roughly 71,000 active gas wells, up from about 36,000 in 2000.
• There were more than 493,000 active natural-gas wells in the United States in 2009, almost double the number in 1990
• Around 90 percent have used hydrofracking to get more gas flowing, according to the drilling industry
• Gas has seeped into underground drinking-water supplies in at least five states, including Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and West Virginia, and residents blamed natural-gas drilling.
• Air pollution caused by natural-gas drilling is a growing threat, too. Wyoming, for example, failed in 2009 to meet federal standards for air quality for the first time in its history partly because of the fumes containing benzene and toluene from roughly 27,000 wells, the vast majority drilled in the past five years.
• In a sparsely populated Sublette County in Wyoming, which has some of the highest concentrations of wells, vapors reacting to sunlight have contributed to levels of ozone higher than those recorded in Houston and Los Angeles.
• In late 2008, drilling and coal-mine waste released during a drought so overwhelmed the Monongahela that local officials advised people in the Pittsburgh area to drink bottled water.
• In Texas, which now has about 93,000 natural-gas wells, up from around 58,000 a dozen years ago, a hospital system in six counties with some of the heaviest drilling said in 2010 that it found a 25 percent asthma rate for young children, more than three times the state rate of about 7 percent.
• • Typical response, cast doubt on the cause
• The industry and state regulators have said it is not clear what role the gas industry has played in causing such problems, since the area has had high air pollution for a while.
• Drilling companies were issued roughly 3,300 Marcellus gas-well permits in Pennsylvania last year, up from just 117 in 2007.
• Anywhere from 10 percent to 40 percent of the water sent down the well during hydrofracking returns to the surface, carrying drilling chemicals, very high levels of salts and, at times, naturally occurring radioactive material.
• It is the only state that has allowed drillers to discharge much of their waste through sewage treatment plants into rivers.
• But some plants were taking such large amounts of waste with high salt levels in 2008 that downstream utilities started complaining that the river water was eating away at their machines.
• More than 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater was produced by Pennsylvania wells over the past three years, far more than has been previously disclosed. Most of this water — enough to cover Manhattan in three inches — was sent to treatment plants not equipped to remove many of the toxic materials in drilling waste.
• At least 12 sewage treatment plants in three states accepted gas industry wastewater and discharged waste that was only partly treated into rivers, lakes and streams.
• Of more than 179 wells producing wastewater with high levels of radiation, at least 116 reported levels of radium or other radioactive materials 100 times as high as the levels set by federal drinking-water standards. At least 15 wells produced wastewater carrying more than 1,000 times the amount of radioactive elements considered acceptable.

• Industry officials say they are not concerned.

   “These low levels of radioactivity pose no threat to the public or worker safety and are more a public perception issue than a real health threat,” said James E. Grey, chief operating officer of Triana Energy.

  • These idiots don't get it; these 'low levels' accumulate as the drilling spreads ... just like the bubbles, it will reach a breaking point
• Under federal law, testing for radioactivity in drinking water is required only at drinking-water plants. But federal and state regulators have given nearly all drinking-water intake facilities in Pennsylvania permission to test only once every six or nine years.

  • Is this a recent change to the regulations?
• in 2009 and 2010, public sewage treatment plants directly upstream from some of these drinking-water intake facilities accepted wastewater that contained radioactivity levels as high as 2,122 times the drinking-water standard. But most sewage plants are not required to monitor for radioactive elements in the water they discharge.
• So there is virtually no data on such contaminants as water leaves these plants. Regulators and gas producers have repeatedly said that the waste is not a threat because it is so diluted in rivers or by treatment plants. But industry and federal research cast doubt on those statements.
• A confidential industry study from 1990, conducted for the American Petroleum Institute, concluded that “using conservative assumptions,” radium in drilling wastewater dumped off the Louisiana coast posed “potentially significant risks” of cancer for people who eat fish from those waters regularly.
• Three months after The Times began asking questions about radioactive and other toxic material being discharged into specific rivers, state regulators placed monitors for radioactivity near where drilling waste is discharged. Data will not be available until next month, state officials said.
• But the monitor in the Monongahela is placed upstream from the two public sewage treatment plants that the state says are still discharging large amounts of drilling waste into the river, leaving the discharges from these plants unchecked and Pittsburgh exposed.

  • These guys are either inept or corrupt
• Mr. McCurdy, whose plant discharges into the Clarion River, which flows into the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, said his plant was taking about 20,000 gallons of drilling waste per day.
• Documents filed by drillers with the state, though, show that in 2009 his facility was sent water from wells whose wastewater was laced with radium at 275 times the drinking-water standard and with other types of radiation at more than 780 times the standard.
• “If we’re too hard on them,” the inspector added, “the companies might just stop reporting their mistakes.”

  • That has got to be one of the lamest excuses ever
• The state is considering whether to require treatment plants to begin monitoring for radioactivity in wastewater.
• Drilling contamination is entering the environment in Pennsylvania through spills, too. In the past three years, at least 16 wells whose records showed high levels of radioactivity in their wastewater also reported spills, leaks or failures of pits where hydrofracking fluid or waste is stored, according to state records.
• Gas producers report their own spills, write their own spill response plans and lead their own cleanup efforts
• John Hanger, who stepped down as secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection in January, has said. “It’s cheaper to dump wastewater than to treat it.”
• From October 2008 through October 2010, regulators were more than twice as likely to issue a written warning than to levy a fine for environmental and safety violations, according to state data. During this period, 15 companies were fined for drilling-related violations in 2008 and 2009, and the companies paid an average of about $44,000 each year, according to state data.
• This average was less than half of what some of the companies earned in profits in a day and a tiny fraction of the more than $2 million that some of them paid annually to haul and treat the waste.
• In December, the Republican governor-elect, Tom Corbett, who during his campaign took more gas industry contributions than all his competitors combined, said he would reopen state land to new drilling, reversing a decision made by his predecessor, Edward G. Rendell. The change clears the way for as many as 10,000 wells on public land, up from about 25 active wells today.

• In arguing against a proposed gas-extraction tax on the industry, Mr. Corbett said regulation of the industry had been too aggressive.

   “I will direct the Department of Environmental Protection to serve as a partner with Pennsylvania businesses, communities and local governments,” Mr. Corbett says on his Web site. “It should return to its core mission protecting the environment based on sound science.”

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